Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Amid reports of women and children killed in US air offensive, official says the 'near certainty' policy doesn’t apply. Because Obama.

(Yahoo News) The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria's Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police guarded Jewish settlers as they moved into seven homes in a Palestinian neighborhood of east Jerusalem on Tuesday.

The homes in Silwan, which sits in the shadow of Jerusalem's Old City, were purchased by Elad, a pro-settlement group that uses funds from Jewish supporters in the United States and elsewhere to buy properties in Palestinian districts.

Tuesday's move was the largest purchase of homes in Silwan since the process began in the neighborhood in 1986, taking to 26 the number of Jewish-owned properties, local officials said. Around 90 Jewish families, totaling 500 people, live in Silwan among some 50,000 Palestinians. Israeli police protect them.

[...]

Relatives said one of Karaeen's sons had sold a dwelling inside the grounds of the family home to a Palestinian broker about a year ago for 1.2 million shekels ($300,000), around twice as much as the property was probably worth.

Karaeen refused to speak to visitors on Tuesday, with family members saying he was too ashamed by what his son had done. Karaeen's brother said he had spoken by phone to the son, who had fled to the north of Israel.

In the past, Palestinians found to have sold their homes to settler organizations have been killed.

[...]

Asked what would happen to the son and the broker to whom he had sold the property, Maragha said he felt they should die, but he did not expect that to happen.

"We know who the broker is. He's living in a town south of Jerusalem," he said. "But he's rich and he's protected, including by the Israelis."

(AWDNews) The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) intends to inaugurate its first diplomatic mission in Istanbul in order to provide consular services for all who wish to join the extremist group in Iraq, reported Turkish daily Aydinlik as saying.

Abu-Omar Al-Tunisi, the ISIS de facto head of foreign relations issued a statement, saying that the Islamic Caliphate is determined to launch its first diplomatic mission in a friendly and Muslim country. He further noted that the ISIS hopes that the bilateral relations with Ankara will witness more developments under the aegis of newly-elected president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

ISIS also claims that its consulate in Istanbul will pay the hospital bills of all wounded Islamist militants who traveled to turkey to receive medical treatment.

CHP (Republican People's Party), a leading Turkish opposing party issued a communique condemning Turkish government decision to allow ISIS to open a legal diplomatic office in Çankaya - the central and elegant metropolitan district of the city of Istanbul.

Earlier, the Turkish Prime Minster Ahmet Davutoglu acknowledged that Turkish diplomats, kidnapped by ISIS militants when Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city was seized in early-June, were released in a prisoner exchange deal with ISIS.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Monday, September 29, 2014

(England) A visitor to a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint in Leicester was somewhat surprised to find his request for one of those little wet wipes you get with your meal was missing. So when he went to ask for one, he was informed that as the joint was halal, and the wet wipes contained ethanol, they couldn't serve him with one, in case it offended... Muslims. However, the management forgot to ask Muslims who have stated they don't have a problem with the use of wet wipes. It seems that so scared are people of offending Muslims in the UK today that they actually end up offending... everybody, including... Muslims.

(Kabul) Today saw the inauguration of the new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. However, the man voted in by the people didn't impress Islamic terrorists who just could not understand why the people of Afghanistan would want to democratically vote for him when guns, bombs and beheadings of Allah, as used by these peaceful thugs, dictate that you have to vote surrender to them.

So in order to express their displeasure, they sent a village idiot to a checkpoint near the airport and he detonated himself, killing 7 people and injuring 14. Yup, the peaceful religion strikes again.

MURSITPINAR (Reuters) - Turkish tanks took up position on a hill overlooking the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani on Monday after several shells hit Turkish territory as Islamic State militants fired on the town, a Reuters correspondent said.

At least 15 tanks were positioned, some with their guns pointed towards Syrian territory, near a Turkish military base just northwest of Kobani. Plumes of smokes rose up as shells hit both the eastern and western sides of Kobani.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

(CNN) -- A man who allegedly beheaded a woman in Oklahoma will be charged Monday, authorities said.

Charges against Alton Alexander Nolen will include first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon, according to Jeremy Lewis, spokesman for the Moore police department.

Nolen, a recent convert to Islam, allegedly attacked a woman Thursday at a Vaughan Foods processing plant, soon after he learned he'd lost his job there.

Police said he walked into the front office and attacked one of the first people he encountered, Colleen Hufford, 54. He severed her head with a knife and then attacked 43-year-old Traci Johnson. Johnson is in stable condition at a nearby hospital for treatment of "numerous wounds," according to police.

The Israeli Prime Minister had earlier congratulated Narendra Modi after the BJP's emphatic win in the Lok Sabha polls via a phone call within 24 hours of the results being declared.

Earlier today, Barak Ravid, the diplomatic correspondent for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, while speaking to ANI described his country's relationship with India as that of a mistress.

"India and Israel have had very strong and strategic relations for many years in cooperation in security, health, and agriculture, but Israel was always the mistress in the sense that the relations were strong but everything was under the carpet and not public," he said.

"What will be interesting in this meeting is if Netanyahu will get an invitation from Prime Minister Modi to come to New Delhi. If this will take place, I think it will be very significant because the last Israeli Prime Minister to visit India was Ariel Sharon more than ten years ago," Ravid added.

Ravid also talked about the close counter-terrorism relations that the two countries share.

"I think that Israel and India are working together on counter-terrorism for many years, especially on radical Islamic terrorism, Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorism and Lashkar-e-Taiba affiliated terrorism," he said.

(Daily Star) Defence Secretary Michael Fallon last night said the jihadis had posed a “very direct threat to this country”.

And he vowed those detained would be “brought before the courts”.

IS is a banned terror organisation and being a member is a crime, which carries a maximum 10 years in jail.

Intelligence experts are monitoring the movements of 500 Brits who travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the terror network.

But it is the first time that it has been revealed so many of them have slipped back into the country.

Some of the Brit jihadists in Syria are known to have contacted the UK authorities asking if they can come back after being shocked by the violence displayed by IS. Yesterday House Of Commons leader William Hague, 53, warned of a “mushrooming” threat from IS as more trained fighters may now try and head back to Britain to dodge an aerial bombardment.

Mr Fallon, 62, told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend: “We have toughened up now on the issue of passports and the watch on our ports and airports for returning fighters.

“Over 60 returning fighters have now been arrested. There are continuing threats to this country from returning fighters.”

OAKLAND, California (AP) — Officials say a group of pro-Palestinian protesters are again blocking an Israeli-owned ship from unloading its cargo at a port in California.

International Longshore and Warehouse Union spokesman Craig Merrilees says dockworkers at the Port of Oakland did not unload cargo from the ZIM Shanghai on Saturday because of safety concerns raised by the presence of police and protesters.

He said the protesters blocked workers from driving into the terminal during their morning and evening shifts. An ILWU statement later said the workers "were threatened physically" by the demonstrators.

(INN) A week ago I guessed that the next beheading wouldn’t even make the headlines. I was nearly correct.

We are getting accustomed to the charms of Radical Islam, so last week’s beheading of Colleen Hufford, 54, at the hands of suspect Alton Nolen, 30, a convert to Islam, was simply the beheading of the week. Give the people a regular diet of the same bad medicine and soon it doesn’t taste so bad. Becomes habit forming.

Most of us who expected something like this, we thought only of New York – never Oklahoma.

Yes, Oklahoma, as in “You’re doing fine Oklahoma” from the musical of the same name.

The suspect had a grievance. He got fired from Vaughan Foods so he did what comes naturally in the world of Jihad.

This happened in a small town named Moore, but this is not a local story any more than Pearl Harbor was a local story. The Japanese attacked us on a date that will live in infamy and likewise Radical Islam attacked us (once again) on a day we should never forget -- but on the whole, the news media shrugged.

Some locals, we’re told, were unhappy with even the small amount of coverage because it mentioned the Islamic connection. Gotcha.

Now go back to bed and sleep tight.

If a beheading in America gets no special attention, we are sunk. Granted, we don’t want to get alarmist, but let’s not get too comfy, either.

Fox News gave the story the attention it deserved, mainly Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity, and I did see something about it on CNN.

Generally, though, America is still hiding under the covers. If we don’t talk about it, it didn’t happen, right? We’re safe as long as we stick to football.

We’re even safer when we worry about the Washington Redskins getting a name-change to satisfy the politically correct. That’s a sure bet to get us heated up. An even more reliable distraction is climate change. We will always have actors who need to prove that they are also Real People, so standing before the United Nations, here was Leonardo DiCaprio complaining that the world was getting too hot for Hollywood.

Then this for the scoop of the week: Congratulations…stop the presses…George Clooney got married.

Meanwhile – somewhere in America a woman just got her head chopped off!

The man said he is coming after all of us…he and his fellow crazies. There are thousands of them, and maybe millions, and some next door.

I understand the reluctance to confront the threat. I’m a sucker for pop culture.

So count me among those who would rather have our “old worries” rather than face something so gruesome as headhunting Islamic Jihad.

Especially when it keeps coming closer to home. But when we lose our sense of outrage we surrender ourselves to lawlessness and chaos.

Trust The New York Times to alertly change the subject. The next day’s paper, online, was busy with three items under happenings in the United States – Ferguson once, and Ferguson twice. That’s the Missouri town where a white policeman shot and killed a black teenager for reasons still to be determined by a grand jury.

The Times adores this story because it is white on black. Now in Oklahoma where the colors are reversed, the Times would rather not give it a second thought.

The third big headline? Chelsea Clinton birthed a baby.

Keep this up and the next beheading, I predict, won’t be newsworthy at all except as a minor item under Trends.

We’d rather forget that the barbarians we are fighting in Iraq and Syria are also at home and at work here in America. We need to wake up!

(JPost) A plan to rid Gaza and the West Bank of Israeli presence will be presented to the UN Security Council in about two weeks time, Israel Radio reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed Palestinian source.

The source said that they are planning to present the proposal first to Mahmoud Abbas and then work out technical details.

On Friday, during his speech at the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said that without a “firm timetable” in place to end the Israeli presence in Gaza and the West Bank, there’s no value in continuing peace talks.

This comes following the news that Obama intends to kill highly successful Tomahawk and Hellfire missile programs.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted on Sunday as saying that the time had come for his country to modernize its nuclear and conventional arsenals.

"I don’t think we are on the verge of a new arms race. At least, Russia definitely won't be part of it. In our case, it's just that the time has come for us to modernize our nuclear and conventional arsenals," Lavrov said, according to a transcript of an interview with Russia Today television published on its website.

"We have a long-term armament program, which takes into account our economic situation and, of course, the need to have efficient and modern defensive capabilities to protect our national interest ... We haven’t been doing much in this regard for a number of years," he added.

(Weekly Standard) On Friday Colin Kahl was named Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser and deputy assistant to the president. Kahl previously served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East between 2009-2011, but is probably best known for his work outside of government—in particular, for advocating containment of a nuclear Iran, and for his part in trying to remove the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel from the 2012 Democratic platform.

In his role as senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank close to the Obama administration, Kahl floated what was widely recognized as a trial balloon on behalf of the administration when he co-authored a report explaining how American policymakers would go about containing a nuclear Iran. Kahl’s report, “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” argued that while Obama says his policy is to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, the fact is that “prevention – up to and including the use of force – could fail, leaving Washington with little choice but to manage and mitigate the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.”

Meanwhile, Kahl was helping out in the drafting of parts of the 2012 Democratic party platform. As Josh Rogin and Ben Smith reported at the time, Kahl and Congressman Robert Wexler were responsible for altering the platform so that it omitted mention of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which represented a change in longstanding party policy. As one source told Rogin at the time: "Colin Kahl and Bob Wexler bear personal responsibility for the platform debacle and the embarrassment caused to the president and the party. … They led a secretive, exclusionary process, rather than an inclusive one, recklessly threw out the longstanding platform language, and then attempted to cover their tracks by misleading stakeholders about what they had done and with whom they had consulted." Under pressure, the president had to overrule Kahl and put Jerusalem back in. But Democrats still paid a political price.

It’s hardly surprising then that a number of foreign policy experts are left scratching their heads with Kahl’s appointment. “Colin Kahl left the administration under a cloud of failure,” said one senior official at a pro-Israel organization in Washington, D.C. "He tried to insert an anti-Israel plank into the Democratic party's platform and failed to the point where the president had to personally intervene to repair the damage. Since he left government, he has galloped to the fringe of the Iran debate, floating all kinds of suggestions—including letting Iran go nuclear—that the party had to publicly shoot down. You really have to ask yourself why Joe Biden thought he was an appropriate choice.”

Kahl will be replacing Jake Sullivan, who reportedly led the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. It’s hard not to conclude that Kahl was brought to carry out the next phase of the administration’s policy. If Sullivan’s engagement with Iran led to the White House’s acknowledgment of the clerical regime’s right to enrich uranium, Kahl will be leading the effort to persuade the American people that containment of a nuclear Islamic Republic is a reasonable policy goal.

The Imam was Imad Enchassi the last I heard. He was a friend of mine. He is a Lebanese-born Sunni who hates Israel. He once gave a sermon that the Israelis were trying to collapse al-Aqsa mosque by digging tunnels underneath it. They have no issue with Palestinian suicide bombings because, as it was explained to me, that is the only weapon the Palestinians have.

That’s not a surprise, as Imam Imad Enchassi denounced Israel on social media and claimed to have family in Gaza who were killed during conflicts with Israel. Considering that Israel targets Hamas terrorists, that certainly raises some questions.

Oddly enough, Amira Hass in a way supports the act as she finds it “understandable”. But what else would you expect from a Haaretz juorno?

(Inquisitr) In a display of open racism, the Birzeit University near to Ramallah in the West-Bank, expelled a left-wing, pro-Palestinian journalist on Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, simply for being Jewish by birth.

Amira Hass, who is well-known in Israel for championing Palestinian allegations of occupation and Israeli war crimes, attended the Alternatives to Neo-Liberal Development in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Critical Perspectives conference at the university on Saturday, but was promptly asked to leave by the conference’s organizers.

Hass is a prime example of what is known as a “self-hating Jew” as she writes article after article condemning the democratic Jewish State, even though she was born there and is an Israeli citizen. She is a good friend to the likes of Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and even chooses to live in Ramallah despite the horrific human rights violations regularly perpetrated there, often against women.

By way of a twisted explanation for ejecting Hass from the conference simply for being a Jew and an Israeli, the University said that due to a number of complaints about her presence at the conference she was removed “for her own safety.” The move was justified as apparently Palestinian students need “a safe space” free of Jews.

Imagine if an African-American was asked to leave a similar conference in America or if a Muslim was asked to leave an event in London, simply because they were Muslim by faith. The outrage from such incidents would surely and rightfully be massive.

But in her typical left-wing, self-hating fashion, the Haaretz reporter wrote an article basically defending the university for removing her for being a Jew, essentially saying that it’s “understandable” as it always is, due to the alleged “occupation” and Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.

Even though Hass noted that, “Palestinian citizens of Israel [i.e. Israeli Arabs - ed.] who teach at Israeli universities are not subject to the same policy,” she wrote about how she didn’t blame the Palestinian university for removing her.

Hass is highly critical of many aspects of the Israeli positions in the conflict with the Palestinians to the degree that she cannot bring herself to condemn outright the racist and fascist behavior she herself was subjected to in the name of Palestinian statehood and Islam.

(ABC2) A man driving a distinctive Toyota fired on a group of three men walking along Old Pimlico Road after shouting “Jews, Jews, Jews" from his driver’s side window, according to a release from Baltimore County police.

The men weren't hurt, although police found a hole in the glass window of Bais Hamedrash and Mesivta of Baltimore, an all-male private school.

The shooter was driving from Green Summit Road when he came across the group in the 6800 block of Old Pimlico Road at about 5:30 p.m.

“As the vehicle came closer, the driver held a weapon outside the car window,” according to a release. “The weapon appeared to be some type of BB or air gun. The driver yelled ‘Jews, Jews, Jews’ at the victims and fired the weapon in their direction.”

Although it is unclear if the victims were of Jewish faith, the shooting falls on the same day as Rosh Hashanah, commonly referred to as the Jewish New Year. Police called the shooting a “bias incident,” in the release.

More form the release:

The suspect is described as a white male, brown hair, dark complexion, possibly of Middle Eastern descent. The suspect was driving a black and white Toyota Corolla or Prius with tinted windows. The top portion of the car was black and lower portion white.

If anyone has any information about this crime, please call the Baltimore County Police at (410) 307-2020.

MOORE — The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Oklahoma (CAIR) said he didn’t know where murder suspect Alton Alexander Nolen learned about Islam.

My guess is at the local mosque. But it's just a wild speculation.

Adam Soltani said he didn’t know if Nolen was a member of an Oklahoma mosque. It’s also not clear how long ago Nolen converted, though officials and co-workers described it as recently.

Department of Corrections records show that as far back as 2013, Nolen had a chest tattoo reading “As-Salaamu Ataikum,” a misspelling of an Arabic phrase, which translates to “Peace be upon you.” He also has a chest tattoo of Jesus and arm tattoos of “RIP Lil Kris, Judah” and praying hands on his arms.

Sources close to the investigation said Nolen adopted the online persona of “Jah’Keem Yisreal,” a phrase that the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations leaders said has no meaning in the Arabic language. Muslim leaders said it was odd that someone proclaiming themselves as Muslim would adopt a name so close to Hebrew.

(Newsmax) President Barack Obama said U.S. intelligence officials failed to appreciate the gains made by Islamic State extremists in Syria during the last few years of that country’s civil war.

“I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said in a taped interview that will air in full tonight on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program.

“Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned,” the president said, Islamic State was “able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos.” Obama spoke in an excerpt aired today on the TV network’s “Face the Nation” program.

“This became ground zero for jihadists around the world,” Obama said of Syria, where Islamic State now controls territory in the east, centered on the city of Raqqa.

Obama also said the U.S. overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi army to fight the radical Sunni group, which also controls part of northern Iraq.

“Where you’ve got states that are failing or in the midst of civil war, these kinds of organizations thrive,” he said.

(INN) Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud) said on Wednesday that Iran had conducted experiments with nuclear weapons at the Parchin military base, where the West believes suspicious nuclear activities have taken place based on satellite evidence.

According to a statement from Steinitz, quoted by the Reuters news agency, Iran used the Parchin military base as the site for secret tests of technology that could be used only for detonating a nuclear weapon.

The statement was issued a day before Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was to address the UN General Assembly.

According to Steinitz, internal neutron sources such as uranium were used in nuclear implosion tests at Parchin. Israel based its information on "highly reliable information", he added, without elaborating.

The statement gave no specific dates for such testing, saying only that it occurred during what it called the 2000-2001 construction of a nuclear weaponization test site in Parchin.

DUBAI (Reuters) - A Saudi Arabian wanted for his role in violent protests calling for more rights for the Shi'ite Muslim minority has died from injuries sustained in a shootout with police on Friday, local media reported on Sunday.

The Sunni-ruled kingdom has been searching for a number of citizens suspected of involvement in anti-government violence in the Eastern Province, where a substantial number of the country's Shi'ite Muslim minority live.

Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman General Mansour Turki on Saturday said that security forces shot and wounded Bassem Ali al-Qudaihi during an exchange of fire when they tried to arrest him in the town of al-Awamiya.

"He was transferred to hospital for treatment and the necessary medical attention," state news agency SPA quoted Turki as saying.

Non-Islamic Islamic State fighters that is. Because according to Obama, who bills himself as the top authority on Islam, these Islamic State fighters do not represent Islam.

AMMAN (Reuters) - Islamic State fighters have killed 40 Kurdish militia in the past five days of heavy fighting for the strategic Syrian town of Kobani, near the border with Turkey, a monitoring group said on Saturday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said some of the Kurdish casualties were caused by a suicide bomber who drove into the western outskirts of the town in a vehicle disguised to look as though it was carrying humanitarian aid. It did not say when the incident took place.

In all, hundreds of fighters from Russia’s North Caucasus, where Chechnya is located, and other Russian-speaking regions are believed to be fighting in Syria and Iraq, alongside the Islamic State and al-Qaida-linked groups like the Al-Nusra Front.

The Chechens aren’t the largest group among the thousands of foreigners in Syria, but they may be playing an outsized role, as many, battle-hardened by years fighting Russian forces, help spearhead the Islamic State’s sweeping successes through Syria and Iraq, experts said.

This bodes poorly not only for U.S. efforts to roll back the Islamic State in the near term, but also could mean a new cycle of violence is looming for Russia’s long-troubled North Caucasus.

And this may be an indication why the U.S. State and Treasury departments on Wednesday slapped new financial sanctions on several top Chechens, and the military units they lead.

“I think that’s a reason why the Islamic State has been as successful as they’ve been,” said Bill Roggio, founder of the Long War Journal, a website that tracks jihadi groups.

“The fighters from the Caucasus, they have experience in fighting professional militaries, the Russians, they’ve been doing guerrilla warfare for decades and this experience is translating to the battlefield," he said. "They tend to be tactically proficient.”

“These aren’t the guys that go around occupying someone’s villa then sitting around by the swimming pool eating Snickers bars. They are hard fighters,” said Richard Barrett, senior vice president at the Soufan Group, a New York-based security consulting group.

(US News) In his recent address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Barack Obama denounced Islamic radicalism, and, in the same breath, praised Palestinian statehood. In these oddly contradictory remarks, he then added that too many Israelis are ready to abandon peace. "And that's something," he warned further, "worthy of reflection within Israel."

This seeming afterthought was gratuitous, and way off the mark. Most Israelis are substantially more aware than Obama of the evident similarities and connections between the Islamic State group, al-Qaida, Fatah and Hamas. Unlike the American president, they also understand that a future Palestinian state – any Palestinian state – would quickly become just another institutionalized national source of worldwide terror and jihad. Unlike him, these Israelis can easily recognize the absurd irony of opposing a jihadi Islamic State group, while simultaneously endorsing a jihadi "Palestine."

[...]

Regrettably, Obama is still convinced of some sort of creditable symmetry between Israeli and Palestinian claims for statehood. Somehow, still buying into the most elementary and rhetorical misrepresentations of international law obtaining in that region between 1917 (the Balfour Declaration) and 1947 (formal U.N.a General Assembly enactment of a Jewish State), he remains altogether willing to equate an Israeli return to indefensible borders with "peace." In essence, any willing Israeli surrender to this American president's vision of a two-state solution would represent little more than a final capitulation to another Final Solution.

[...]

All of the Islamic world, "moderates" as well as "radicals," demand a one-state solution from Israel. This utterly unambiguous demand is for Israel to disappear and to be transformed from what is presently described as "occupied Palestine," into a larger and uniformly Palestinian state. Cartographically, of course, Israel has already been expunged from the world on all Arab maps, including those of both "moderate" Fatah and "radical" Hamas. Cartographically, at least, Israel has already become the hapless victim of a second Jewish genocide.

These exterminatory Islamist views are not narrowly political or military. Rather, they stem from the doctrinally core notion of umma (community) in Islam, a solidarity entity, one whose foremost and overriding obligation is always to answer the unchanging call of jihad. As had already been declared, forcefully, by all major representatives of the four Sunni Islamic schools of law, on Jan. 9, 1956: "Palestine is a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma, and must therefore be governed in perpetuity by full Islamic law."

The remorseless physical destruction of a Jewish state existing in the Dar al-Islam (the world of Islam) has always been cited as an immutable Islamic duty. Even if they should somehow be grafted into a so-called unified Palestinian state, the continuously fragmented and fratricidal Palestinian communities would never agree to morph into a generally tolerant, unified and peaceful national society. Instead, they would merely come to define a conveniently augmented venue within the existing jihadi movement, one still obligated to help subjugate and suitably transform the much wider Dar al-harb (the world of war).

Any Palestinian state would also have a profoundly detrimental impact on American strategic interests. In short order, this new and 23rd Arab state would cheerfully harbor the very same sort of jihadi adversaries that we are now trying to "degrade" and "destroy" elsewhere, and who would then vie against each other for control of the new jihadi country. Could anything be more obvious? Has Obama already forgotten the effervescent Palestinian joy displayed all over the West Bank and Gaza on Sept. 11, 2001?

BEIRUT, September 26 (RIA Novosti) — Iraqi sappers have defused explosives on six donkeys, rigged by the Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq’s central province Diyala, official representative of the police department of the province Col. Ghalib al-Attiyah told Iraqi TV channel Alsumaria on Friday.

"Sappers have defused six donkeys rigged with explosives by militants ... Our intelligence services have discovered the cattle near the town of Muqdadiyah (35 km north-east of Baqubah). No one was hurt while defusing. We also managed to detain a suspect," the colonel said.

According to him, the extremist militants are using all possible means, including the now rigging cattle with explosives, to attack checkpoints of Iraqi security forces in the region of Muqdadiyah, all of the northern neighborhood of which are under the control of IS militants and are considered to be the main stronghold of the group in the province of Diyala.

The IS, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has been fighting against Syrian government since 2012. In June 2014, the group extended its attacks to northern and western Iraq, declaring a caliphate on the territories over which it had control.

For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.

Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.

Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.

The who?

There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.

The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”

“Core al-Qaeda,” you are to understand, is different from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”). That al-Qaeda, don’t you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.”

Coming soon, “al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine.” In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if, come 2015, Obama issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through al-Qaeda in December.

Except you’ll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad. You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.

As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole — a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way.

Friday, September 26, 2014

(JPost) Japan is looking into an Israeli intelligence tip according to which nine of its nationals have joined Islamic State jihadists in Iraq and Syria, according to The Japan Times.

Tokyo said that the former Israeli ambassador to Japan, Nissim Ben Shitrit, informed the current head of the Japanese air force that Jerusalem had obtained information indicating that nine Japanese nationals had enlisted into the ranks of Islamic State terrorists.

Beirut (AFP) - A senior Islamic State group jihadist was killed on Friday in an air strike in eastern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"A coalition warplane fired on a motorbike with two men on it after it left a headquarters" of IS west of Deir Ezzor city in the province of the same name, the head of the Britain-based monitor told AFP.

"One of the men on the bike was an important IS official, an Arab national," Rami Abdel Rahman said, without giving details about his identity or role.

(Reuters) More than 200 fighters have joined Islamic State in Syria's northern Aleppo province since US President Barack Obama said the United States would strike the militant group in Syria, a monitoring group said on Friday.

US-led forces launched air strikes on Syria on Tuesday, concentrating raids on the north and east to loosen Islamic State's grip on Syria's oil and its presence along the border with Iraq.

At least 162 people joined the radical al-Qaida offshoot in northeast and eastern Aleppo in the week after Obama's speech on Sept. 10, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which gathers information on the conflict.

Islamic State has put particular pressure on rival insurgent groups in this part of Aleppo.

An additional 73 men had joined the group on Sept. 23 and 24 in the northeast Aleppo countryside since the start of the strikes, the Observatory said, bringing the total number since Sept. 10 to at least 235.

"Increasingly, we've moved not only from a security focus to a resiliency focus," said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at Homeland Security, an agency better known for its fight to curb terrorist threats.

Durkovich spoke Thursday on a panel at the Rising Seas Summit, a three-day conference organized by the U.S.-based Association of Climate Change Officers to discuss tools and ideas on building resiliency, particularly against rising sea levels.

In the aftermath of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large swathes of the Northeastern U.S and caused over $60 billion in damages, Durkovich said her department reviewed the task of rebuilding with a new focus on "how to think about baking in resilience from the get-go."

To that end, she said, she has assembled a team of specialists, including city planners, in conjunction with the National Academy of Science to develop better tools for planning.

(Oklahoma) 30-year-old Alton Alexander Nolen wasn't happy when he was sacked from Vaughan Foods in Moore County, Oklahoma, so he went back there and attacked two women which saw, 54-year-old Colleen Hufford being beheaded. He then attacked another female worker (Traci Johnson), before an off-duty sheriff's deputy shot the twat with a rifle. Both he and his last victim have been taken to the hospital for treatment.

But here's the crux, it seems that before he was fired, Nolen had been trying to convert people to Islam. Yes, folks, dickhead is a Muslim, and in that single sentence you know all there is to know about why this prat murdered an innocent woman.

Kabul (AFP) - A major Taliban offensive in eastern Afghanistan over the past week has left up to 100 civilians and security personnel dead, 12 of them beheaded, officials said Friday, as violence worsens with the withdrawal of US-led troops.

This summer's fighting season has seen Taliban forces advance in several provinces, exploiting a political deadlock in Kabul over disputed presidential election results.

The latest series of attacks have focused on Ajristan district in the eastern province of Ghazni, after offensives in recent months in Kandahar, Helmand and Logar provinces.

The Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism command arrested the men, ranging in age between 22 and 51, on suspicion of being members of banned organizations as well as supporting and encouraging terrorism.

Scotland Yard has also raided homes, businesses and community centers as part of the probe. Searches were underway Thursday at 18 sites in London and one residence in Stoke-on-Trent. Police said in a statement that the arrests and searches were part of an ongoing investigation into Islamist-related terrorism rather than any immediate risk to public safety.

Choudary is the former leader of the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, or Islam 4 UK, which was banned by the British government in 2010. He is suspected of radicalizing hundreds of fighters for the Islamic State militant group, including the man believed to have beheaded American journalist James Foley last month.

“If Muslims go anywhere in the world to defend their brethren, this is a good thing. Of course it should be permitted to go and fight,” Choudary told FoxNews.com last month. “Anyone who goes and stands alongside them [the fighters in Iraq] is noble. In anyone’s book it is the right thing to do.

"We could easily have conflict here [in the West] soon," he added. "I believe people are ready for it. We want to walk under the beauty of Shariah."

The arrested men were being held at police stations in central London.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Lebanese army said on Thursday one person was killed and two wounded during a search for suspected militants at refugee camps near the border with Syria.

Soldiers shot at three people on a motorbike who were trying to set fire to parts of a refugee camp during the raids, killing one and wounding the other two, it said.

After dark, the army fired artillery at suspected militants who tried to infiltrate from the border zone, apparently setting off land mines as they did so, a security source said. There were an unknown number of casualties among the militants.

The army has been stepping up efforts to prevent fighters from Syria using the Lebanese border town of Arsal and surrounding areas as a base. Arsal was the scene last month of the deadliest spillover of fighting in the three-year civil war in Syria and is also home to tens of thousands of refugees.

The army says that hundreds of people have been arrested, mainly Syrians accused by authorities of being members of groups such as Nusra Front, Syria's al Qaeda wing, which is fighting President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Security sources said the number detained in the past two weeks had reached about 450.

(Reuters) Member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency rejected on Thursday an Arab resolution criticizing Israel over its assumed atomic arsenal, in a diplomatic victory for Western states that opposed the initiative.

Arab states had submitted the non-binding resolution – which called on Israel to join a global anti-nuclear weapons pact – to the annual meeting of the 162-nation UN nuclear agency, in part to signal their frustration at the lack of progress to move towards a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

The United States and its allies argued that the resolution, if adopted, would be counterproductive. Fifty-eight countries voted against the text and 45 states for. Other countries either abstained or were absent.

FBI Director James Comey said the agency had zeroed in on the masked killer with a British accent, but did not publicly name the Islamic State terrorist on Thursday. Speculation has swirled the man is Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a 23-year-old failed rapper who left London and joined the radical ISIS militants in 2013.

Failed British rapper Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 23, is believed to be the ISIS terrorist
who beheaded US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

(NYDN) The FBI knows the identity of the Islamic State executioner responsible for beheading two American journalists on video, Director James Comey said Thursday.

But the Federal Bureau of Investigation has not publicly named the British-accented terrorist, dubbed “Jihadi John” for his English roots.

Agence-France Presse first reported the killer had been unmasked by American officials.

Speculation has swirled for weeks about the identity of the masked knifeman - seen on video completely covered in a black cloak and threatening President Obama - responsible for the gruesome killings of 40-year-old James Foley and Steven Sotloff, 31.

British officials also believe they have named the barbaric thug, identified by several UK papers as Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a 23-year-old failed rapper who left London and joined the radical ISIS militants in 2013.

(Den Haag) The Dutch Government today said it would send 6 F-16 jets to the Middle East in which support the campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. However, fearful that some Islamist idiot may seek revenge by attacking somebody in a military uniform, the Government sent the message out advising members of the Dutch military not to travel in public in uniform.

(Birmingham) 27-year-old Zeeyarat Khan was obsessed with his fellow coworker, 30-year-old Samera Suleman. So obsessed, in fact, that when she refused to marry him when he asked her, his love for her turned to hatred and he threatened to kill her.

Being repeatedly told by Khan that he was going to kill Samera affected her so much, she handed in her notice, and as she left the shop, Zeeyarat (sounds just like see a rat) picked up a claw hammer and attacked her with it in the street, resulting in skull fractures, a brain injury and a fractured finger for the poor girl.

Today in court, Zeeyarat was handed an 18-year sentence. Let's hope he meets the man of his dreams and that he gets hammered daily in the prison showers, squealing like the pig he is.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

(WFB) President Barack Obama is seeking to abolish two highly successful missile programs that experts say have helped the U.S. Navy maintain military superiority for the past several decades.

The Tomahawk missile program—known as “the world’s most advanced cruise missile”—is set to be cut by $128 million under Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal and completely eliminated by fiscal year 2016, according to budget documents released by the Navy.

In addition to the monetary cuts to the program, the number of actual Tomahawk missiles acquired by the United States would drop significantly—from 196 last year to just 100 in 2015. The number will then drop to zero in 2016.

The Navy will also be forced to cancel its acquisition of the well-regarded and highly effective Hellfire missiles in 2015, according to Obama’s proposal.

The proposed elimination of these missile programs came as a shock to lawmakers and military experts, who warned ending cutting these missiles would significantly erode America’s ability to deter enemy forces.

From DHA (in Turkish): 40-year-old Yakup Bülent Alnıak identified as one of the al-Qaida-linked Al Nusra jihadists killed in an airstrike in Syria. He also was one of the club wielding humanitarians who traveled on a jihad mission to Gaza back in 2010.

(The Guardian) Islamists in the Philippines have threatened to kill two German hostages unless Germany pays a ransom and withdraws its support for the US fight against Isis in Syria and northern Iraq.

In a message circulated via Twitter, the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group announced it would kill one of the hostages unless its demands were met within 15 days, according to US company Site Intelligence Group, which tracks communications from radical Islamist groups.

The message calls on Germany to “stop supporting America in its killing of our Muslim brothers in Iraq and Syria, especially the mujahideen of the Islamic State”.

(London) Two brothers have been jailed for manslaughter after throwing a man into a dockyard where he succumbed to the freezing cold at Shadwell Basin (a former dock from London's maritime past) and drowned.

In March 2010, 27-year-old Amran Chowdhury and and his younger brother Misba Chowdhury, 24, were part of a group which launched an unprovoked attack on Ibrahim Ghrib and his girlfriend. The court heard Ibrahim had been drinking at the basin with his girlfriend on the night of his death. Amran, who had also been drinking, was with his girlfriend at a nearby block of flats. As he left at 9.25pm, he called a friend from his mobile. Soon he was joined by a group including Misba. For no reason they approached Ibrahim and hit his girlfriend in the head a number of times with a bottle, knocking her out. When she came around, she heard her Moroccan-born boyfriend shouting from the 12m (40ft) deep water of the basin and the group running off. Despite the efforts of two men, Mr Ghrib could not be rescued and he froze to death within minutes.

Amran's phone was recovered from the scene and police arrested him and his brother. At the Old Bailey today Amran (above left) was sentenced to six years in prison for the attack and Misba (above centre) to five. Amran's then girlfriend Steffi Rai (above right), 27, of Birmingham will be sentenced at a later date for perverting the course of justice.

(WFB) President Barack Obama favorably quoted and praised on Wednesday in his speech before the United Nations a controversial Muslim cleric whose organization has reportedly endorsed the terror group Hamas and supported a fatwa condoning the murder of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Obama in his remarks offered praise to controversial cleric Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah and referred to him as a moderate Muslim leader who can help combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL or ISIS) radical ideology.

(Daily Mail) A British man was freed by Ukrainian secret services after being kidnapped and tortured while seeking a potential 'bride' through a dating agency in Odessa, it was revealed today.

The man, aged 58, was abducted by a 'criminal gang', believed to be Muslim, after arranging to meet a young woman.

He has been named as Martin John, but he could be John Martin as Ukrainians often give the surname first.

He was held in a cellar for three days while his relatives were contacted in Britain and told he would be killed if they did not pay £3,700 to save his life.

'The scared family made several Western Union transfers of several thousand dollars before finally deciding to contact the Ukrainian embassy in the UK, which then passed the information about the victim to the police,' said Volodymyr Shabliyenko, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

The address where he was held was stormed by police and secret service officers and the man released 'unharmed'.

The kidnappers - believed to include three Muslim men and a Ukrainian woman - were arrested.

The gang's leader was said to be 'a native of the United Arab Emirates who was in Ukraine illegally'.

'They tortured the man and threatened to kill him if his family failed to pay ransom,' stated a local report. It gave no details of his 'torture'.

'The group included four perpetrators, a Ukrainian woman, two Pakistanis and a native of North Caucasus,' said an SBU intelligence agency source.

(Daily Mail) A Miami high school student brutally raped at female teacher at his school after choking until she passed out, police say.

Victor Marshall Nash, 18, is charged with attempted first degree murder, sexual battery, robbery and grand theft for the alleged attack on his teacher at South Dade Senior High School on Friday.

Detectives say two hours after the last class ended, Nash approached the teacher and put his arm around her. When she told him 'No, stop,' he body-slammed her to the ground and smashed her head against the floor.

The 6-foot-1, 200lb teen then choked the teacher until she passed out. While she was unconscious, he raped her and left the used condom in her purse, police say.